ASP Announces Ten Winners for
"Best Web Support Sites of 2013"

The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) has announced the
winners of its sixteenth annual "Ten Best Web Support Sites"
competition, a prestigious award that showcases excellence in
online service and support.

The 2013 winners include (in alphabetical order) seven Open Division
entries—Check Point Software, Cisco Systems, EMC, Intel, Nokia,
PTC, and Red Hat—and three companies, Ancestry.com, TeamSupport
and Tricentis, were named winners in the Small Company Division. In
addition, Check Point Software was named to the Web Support Hall of
Fame, and another world-class support site, Cisco Systems, gained an
additional Hall of Fame star.

The award winners were selected by a panel of judges with expertise
in Web support design and implementation, using a scoring system
based on 25 separate performance criteria. The evaluation process
covers the following areas:

Overall usability, design, and navigation

Knowledgebase and search implementation

Interactive features

Community Engagement

The major site development challenge

The ten winning sites will be profiled in a book called "The Ten
Best Web Support Sites of 2013", to be published by the ASP in August.

“Web support continues to evolve rapidly," says ASP founder Jeffrey
Tarter. "We constantly update our scoring criteria to reflect
industry trends, large and small, and this year we put a much larger
emphasis on how a site supports external communities. There seems to
be a genuine consensus that online forums and discussion groups are
now a necessary feature for just about any state-of-the-art support
site, and our current scoring reflects this consensus.”

The Association of Support Professionals is an international
membership organization for customer support managers and
professionals. In addition to its annual "Ten Best" awards, the ASP
publishes research reports on a wide range of support topics,
including fee-based support, services marketing, financial ratios,
and support compensation. The ASP also hosts open-access discussion
forums and a job board on LinkedIn.